Black Hole Word Search Printable

A black hole puzzle with its key: the parts, the kinds, how one forms and how astronomers find one.

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Black Hole Word Search

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0 of 16 words found

JRACCRETIONDISK

HERHGRVNCQPBCCN

WLLHKMESTELLARN

OAWYTONQUASARPJ

GTOIETTELESCOPE

RIRHQXHEIAHKRPT

AVMXNLOUXIAHBDT

VIHSCTRSJEDOIAN

ITOOHLIQNWOLTUE

TYLHRSZENNWETIN

YEESUMONGALAXYD

XLKUEPNERTOPLYG

IORNEULIGHTYEAR

YRADIATIONRRVOT

SINGULARITYABTO

This grid is wider and taller than its box. Slide it to see every letter.To drag, hold the first letter for a moment, then slide.Keyboard: Tab to the grid, arrow keys to move, Enter on the first and last letter.

Black holeBLACK HOLE
Event horizonEVENT HORIZON
SingularitySINGULARITY
Accretion diskACCRETION DISK
JetJET
ShadowSHADOW
StellarSTELLAR
QuasarQUASAR
GravityGRAVITY
RelativityRELATIVITY
OrbitORBIT
RadiationRADIATION
WormholeWORMHOLE
TelescopeTELESCOPE
GalaxyGALAXY
Light-yearLIGHT-YEAR

16 of 23 words from the Black Hole Key Terms list.

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Answer key: Black Hole Word Search

JRACCRETIONDISK

HERHGRVNCQPBCCN

WLLHKMESTELLARN

OAWYTONQUASARPJ

GTOIETTELESCOPE

RIRHQXHEIAHKRPT

AVMXNLOUXIAHBDT

VIHSCTRSJEDOIAN

ITOOHLIQNWOLTUE

TYLHRSZENNWETIN

YEESUMONGALAXYD

XLKUEPNERTOPLYG

IORNEULIGHTYEAR

YRADIATIONRRVOT

SINGULARITYABTO

BLACK HOLE, EVENT HORIZON, SINGULARITY, ACCRETION DISK, JET, SHADOW, STELLAR, QUASAR, GRAVITY, RELATIVITY, ORBIT, RADIATION, WORMHOLE, TELESCOPE, GALAXY, LIGHT-YEAR

Next step Type in the terms from your own space unit Scramble the same black hole words

All 119 words

Parts of a Black Hole 21

Accretion disk The hot, bright, rapidly spinning ring of gas that settles around a black hole.
Boundary What the event horizon is, since a black hole has no solid surface.
Center Where the singularity is predicted to lie.
Charge With mass and spin, one of the three properties that fully describe a black hole.
Corona A thin, turbulent, billion-degree cloud over the inner disk that gives off X-rays.
Dust With gas, the material in the rings that surround some black holes.
Ergosphere The region between a spinning black hole's event horizon and an outer surface.
Event horizon The boundary of no return: whatever passes inside it stays inside, even light.
Gas What a black hole can pull off a nearby star, and what its bright disk is made of.
Infinite Without limit, as the density at the singularity is predicted to be.
Inner edge The part of the disk from which matter finally falls into the event horizon.
Jet A stream of particles fired away from near a black hole at close to the speed of light.
Mass The amount of matter in a black hole, measured against the Sun's.

Show all 119 words (106 more)

Parts of a Black Hole, continued

Matter What a black hole is made of: a huge amount of it packed into a very tiny space.
Photon sphere Where light circles a black hole, seen as thin rings at the edge of the shadow.
Point What the singularity is predicted to be: one spot with no size.
Radius With the name Schwarzschild, the size of the event horizon for a given mass.
Rings Thin circles of light at the edge of the shadow, each a distorted image of the disk.
Shadow The dark zone astronomers see, roughly twice as big as the event horizon itself.
Singularity The point at the very center where relativity predicts matter is crushed to infinite density.
Spin To turn. All black holes do; the fastest known turns over 1,000 times a second.

Kinds and Names of Black Holes 21

Active Describes a galaxy core that pours out more energy than its stars could make.
Binary A pair: two black holes in close orbit, or a black hole and a star.
Black hole An object so compact that nothing, not even light, can get away from its gravity.
Blazar An active galaxy core whose jet points very nearly at the observer.
Candidate An object suspected, but not yet confirmed, to be a black hole.
Cygnus With "X-1", the first X-ray source widely accepted to be a black hole.
Gaia With "BH1", the nearest known black hole, about 1,500 light-years away.
Intermediate The kind in the middle by mass, with many candidates that are hard to confirm.
Isolated Describes a black hole with no disk around it, which is very hard to find.
Messier With the number 87, the galaxy whose black hole was the first to be imaged.
Micro Describes a hypothetical black hole with less mass than the Sun.
Missing link A nickname for the intermediate kind that scientists are still hunting for.
Monster NASA's nickname for the giant black holes at the centers of galaxies.
Primordial The suspected kind that may have formed in the first second after the universe began.
Quasar An extremely bright galaxy core, powered by gas falling toward a supermassive black hole.
Rotating Turning about an axis, as every known star, planet and black hole does.
Sagittarius With "A*", the giant black hole in the middle of the Milky Way.
Solar mass A unit about equal to the mass of the Sun, used to weigh stars and black holes.
Stellar The kind born when the core of a very massive star collapses.
Supermassive The kind found at the center of almost every large galaxy.
Virgo The constellation that holds the galaxy Messier 87.

How a Black Hole Forms 21

Collapse To fall inward under gravity, as a massive star's core does when its fuel is gone.
Collision A crash with a star or another black hole, one way a black hole gains mass.
Compact Describes white dwarfs, neutron stars and black holes: high mass in a small radius.
Consume To take in. A black hole grows as it does this to gas and stars.
Core The hot, dense center of a star.
Crush To squeeze with great force, as gravity does to matter at a black hole's center.
Dense With a lot of mass packed into a small space.
Explosion A sudden, violent burst outward, which is how a massive star ends.
Fuel What a massive star runs out of before its core collapses.
Gravity The pull that draws matter together and holds a star in one piece.
Hypernova A very energetic supernova, thought to leave a rotating black hole behind.
Inward Toward the center, the direction gravity draws matter in a collapse.
Massive Describes the stars, over eight times the Sun's mass, that end as supernovae.
Merger The joining of two black holes into one bigger one.
Neutron star The city-sized, superdense object left when the star was not massive enough for a black hole.
Pressure The outward push of a star's hot core, which holds up the weight pressing inward.
Rebound To bounce back, as a collapsing core does just before the star explodes.
Remnant What is left behind after a star explodes.
Shrink To get smaller, as a collapsing star does.
Supergiant A huge star of the kind whose collapsed core can become a neutron star.
Supernova The blast that ends the life of a massive star.

Gravity, Space and Time 29

Bend To curve, as the path of light does near a black hole.
Curvature The bending of space and time by mass.
Einstein The physicist whose general theory of relativity predicts black holes.
Escape velocity The speed needed to break free of an object's gravity.
Evaporate To slowly lose mass and vanish, as a black hole that gains nothing is expected to.
Fabric NASA's word for space-time: "the ... of the universe".
Hawking The physicist who showed in 1974 that black holes should give off faint radiation.
Lensing The bending of light from a distant object by a massive one in front of it.
Light The fastest thing there is, and still unable to get out of a black hole.
Noodle What matter stretched near a black hole comes to resemble.
Observer Someone watching from outside, whom nothing from within the event horizon can reach.
Orbit The curved path of one object around another, such as a star around a black hole.
Paradox With "information", an unsolved problem that arises when quantum theory meets relativity.
Pull What gravity does. From far away, a black hole's is like any object's of the same mass.
Quantum Describes the physics of the very small, needed for a full account of gravity.
Radiation With the name Hawking, the faint energy released just outside the event horizon.
Redshift An increase in the wavelength of light, as when it climbs out of strong gravity.
Relativity The theory that describes gravity as the curving of space and time.
Schwarzschild The physicist who found the first exact solution of Einstein's equations of gravity.
Spacetime Space and time joined in one four-dimensional whole, which mass can warp.
Spaghetti The pasta that gives its name to the stretching of matter near a black hole.
Speed How fast something moves. Light's is as fast as anything can go.
Stretch To pull longer, as tidal force does to anything falling toward a black hole.
Tidal Describes the force that comes from gravity pulling harder on the near side of a body.
Time dilation A difference in the time two clocks measure, caused by speed or by gravity.
Vacuum With "cleaner", what a black hole is not: it does not suck in far-off matter.
Warp To bend out of shape, as a black hole's gravity does to the space around it.
White hole A hypothetical region that nothing can enter, though light and matter can leave it.
Wormhole A hypothetical tunnel between two points in space and time. A black hole is not one.

How Black Holes Are Found 27

Array A set of telescopes that work together as one.
Chandra A NASA space telescope for X-rays, launched in 1999.
Companion The star paired with a black hole, which may lose gas to it.
Detector An instrument that senses gravitational waves as they pass.
Distort To twist out of shape, as a black hole does to the light of objects behind it.
Doppler With "beaming", the effect that makes a jet pointed toward us look brighter.
Emit To give off. Hot gas does this with light; a black hole itself does not.
Galaxy A system of stars, gas and dust bound together by gravity.
Glow To shine with heat, as gas does on its way into a black hole.
Image A picture. The first of a black hole was published on April 10, 2019.
Invisible Not able to be seen, as a black hole is because it neither emits nor reflects light.
Laser The first word in the full name of the observatory called LIGO.
Light-year The distance light travels in one year, about 9.46 trillion kilometers.
LIGO An observatory built to detect gravitational waves, known by its four initials.
Luminous Giving off a great deal of light, as a quasar does.
Milky Way Our galaxy, with a black hole of about 4 million Suns at its center.
Nobel Prize The award given in 2020 for work on the black hole at the Milky Way's center.
Radio The kind of waves collected by the worldwide array that imaged a black hole.
Reflect To bounce light back, which a black hole does not do.
Ripples What gravitational waves are: small disturbances in the fabric of space and time.
Signal A message or sign. None from inside the event horizon can reach an outside observer.
Star A glowing ball of plasma. One paired with a black hole can give the hole away.
Surroundings What astronomers watch to find a black hole, since the hole itself gives off no light.
Telescope An instrument that gathers light. A black hole itself is effectively invisible to one.
Track To follow over time, as astronomers did with stars near the Milky Way's center.
Waves With "gravitational", what very massive objects make when they accelerate through space.
X-rays High-energy light given off by the hot gas that circles a black hole.

How it works

This black hole word search printable draws 16 of 23 key terms, such as Event horizon, Singularity, Accretion disk, Gravity, Galaxy and Light-year. For planets, rockets and constellations, print the space word search.

Read the full guide

Black hole vocabulary, list by list

Under Start from a list, Parts of a Black Hole has 21 words, from Event horizon and Photon sphere to Corona and Jet. Kinds and Names of Black Holes has 21, among them Stellar, Supermassive, Primordial, Sagittarius and Cygnus. How a Black Hole Forms has 21, with Supernova, Collapse and Neutron star.

Gravity and the search

Gravity, Space and Time has 29 words, such as Spacetime, Relativity, Redshift and Wormhole. How Black Holes Are Found has 27, from Telescope and X-rays to Ripples, Detector and Companion.

Fifteen entries have a space or a hyphen and hide closed up: EVENTHORIZON, LIGHTYEAR, XRAYS.

Questions and answers

What are the parts of a black hole?

NASA's anatomy of a black hole names the event horizon, the accretion disk, the event horizon shadow, the photon sphere, the corona, the particle jets and, at the very center, the singularity.

What are the types of black holes?

Astronomers sort black holes by mass into three: stellar-mass, intermediate-mass and supermassive. A fourth kind, primordial black holes formed as the universe was born, is suspected and has not been found.

How do scientists find a black hole?

By what it does to its surroundings, since it gives off no light: X-rays from a hot accretion disk, stars orbiting something unseen, gravitational waves from very massive objects, and the bending of light from objects behind it.

What is spaghettification?

A real term for what happens to matter that gets too close to a black hole: it is squeezed horizontally and stretched vertically until it resembles a noodle. The word has 17 letters, so the list has Spaghetti, Noodle and Stretch.

Does the black hole word search print with an answer key?

Yes, as page 2 on Letter or A4, with every word ringed. Tick Show clues, not words, and Shadow prints as "The dark zone astronomers see, roughly twice as big as the event horizon itself."

All 119 words

Parts of a Black Hole 21

Parts of a Black Hole, continued

Kinds and Names of Black Holes 21

How a Black Hole Forms 21

Gravity, Space and Time 29

How Black Holes Are Found 27

How it works

Black hole vocabulary, list by list

Gravity and the search

Questions and answers

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